Today, my partner Seth wrote a great piece on the merits of early-stage startups raising convertible debt rounds versus traditional preferred stock equity structures.  The piece was inspired by Paul Graham’s recent tweet that said:  “Convertible notes have won. Every investment so far in this YC batch (and there have been a lot) has been done on a convertible note.”

Seth’s piece is a must read in this debate that is only gaining more participants, including a nice follow up from Mark Suster about his thoughts.  I can’t do justice to either Mark’s or Seth’s pieces trying to summarize them, so I strongly encourage you to read them.

I’m going to go out on a limb and break out my old law bar card and bring up one issue that I don’t think is getting enough focus in the debate:  the use of debt fundamentally changes the fiduciary duties of managers and board member of the company.

If a company raises cash via equity, it has a positive balance sheet.  It is solvent (assets are greater than obligations) and the board and executives have fiduciary duties to the shareholders in the efforts to maximize company value.  The shareholders are all the usual suspects – the employees and venture capitalists.  Life is good and normal. 

However, if a company is insolvent, the board and company now owe fiduciary duties to the creditors of the company.  By definition, if you raise a convertible debt round, your company is insolvent.  You have cash, but your debt obligations are greater than your assets.  Your creditors include your landlord, anyone you owe money to and folks that you might owe money to you, like former disgruntled employees and founders who have lawyers. 

How does this change the paradigm?  To be fair, I have had no personal war stories here, but it’s not hard to construct some weird and scary situations.

Let’s look at the hypothetical:

Assume the company is not a success and fails.  In the case of raising equity, the officers and directors only own a duty to the creditors (landlord, etc.) at such time that cash isn’t large enough to pay their liabilities.  If the company manages it correctly, even on the downside scenario creditors are paid off cleanly.  But sometimes it doesn’t happen this way and there are lawsuits.  When the lawyers get involved, they’ll look to try to establish the time in which the company went insolvent and then try to show that the actions of the board were “bad” during that time.  If the time range is short, it’s hard to make a case against the company.

However, if you raise debt, the insolvency time is forever!  Not just when cash got below the ability to pay liabilities like the equity situation, because the company has never been solvent. 

What does this mean?  It means that if your company ends up failing and you can’t pay your creditors, landlords, etc. that their ability for a plaintiff lawyer to judge your actions has increased dramatically.  And don’t forget, if you have any outstanding employment litigation, etc., all of these folks count as creditors as well.   

The best part of all of this is that many states impose personal liability on directors for screwing up things while a company was insolvent.  Read this to be:  “some states will allow creditors to sue directors personally for not getting all of their money they are owed.” 

Now I don’t want to get too crazy here.  We are talking about early-stage / seed companies and hopefully the situation is clean enough that my doomsday predictions won’t happen, but my bet is that few folks participating in convertible debt rounds are actually thinking about these issues.  And no, I don’t know of any actual cases out there, now.  But I’ve been around this business long enough to know that there is constant “innovation” in the plaintiff’s bar as well. 

Today, I was called for jury duty.  Upon arrival, we sat for 30 minutes, then we watched a 12 minute video for juror orientation. The voiceover kept cracking me up, however, as they were unable to pronounce “voir dire” correctly.  (Think “vor dire” as in Dire Straits).  If you don’t believe me, watch the video.

Anyways,we kept moving rooms, filling out forms, being segregated into different piles of humanity and I thought “couldn’t this be simpler?” and made some snide comment under my breath about the efficiency of government.

While I was sitting there being frustrated, I realized that over complicated things, maybe more than anything, really ruin my day.  Then I realized that I was an arrogant ass, because I’m not sure my ecosystem is all that more simple or efficient most of the time, either. 

I could write tomes on all of the efficiencies that I see every day – the same ones that I’m sure you don’t like either.  I think all this artificial complexity probably plays back into our lives in that we start to overcomplicate things that don’t need the added brain damage.  This includes both professional and personal contexts and the sad thing is that we have so little control on most of these situations.

But we should rethink about how we do things when we do have control. 

Thinking back over my career – and specifically even if I just think deeply about the last few  weeks of meetings that I’ve had -I think the number one piece of advice that I’ve given is “keep it simple.” Whether it’s a business model, financing plan, product user interface, or a plan to deal with human conflict, simple is best the vast majority of the time. 

And likewise, when I think back to those seminal moments of mentorship that I’ve been fortunate to receive, there has usually been a component to simply what I was trying to accomplish.

So, there’s my fortune cookie advice for the day: “keep it simple.”  Likely you and those around you will be happier for it. 

Dechert LLP litigation partner Chris Scott Graham recently released his first full-length novel.  It’s not easy as a partner to find time for hobbies, but Chris has evidently not only found the time, but found a real natural talent as well.

The story surrounds Winery Peak, a fictitious winery in Napa that unfortunately finds several of its migrant workers taking sick from toxins found in a nearby creek.  What happens from there is a story of intrigue, as the corporate parent of Winery Peak tries to pin the blame on a fall guy, Peter Dickinson who is a world-renown wine maker and head of winery.  Junior associate Richard Magnus takes the case of Peter to protect both his honor and his liberties without his client really understanding that he’s never taken a case to trial before.  And behind all of this is a shadowy corporate parent organization that pulls at the strings of all the different characters.

I really liked the novel and found the courtroom aspects really interesting.  I learned some things about litigation that I’ve never known, but you don’t need to be a lawyer to appreciate it.  It’s just a good ole fashioned mystery.

Frankly, I was somewhat surprised of the quality of the novel, not anything against Chris, but I know that he is an extremely busy attorney.  This isn’t a case of a guy having a slow practice and having a lot of time on his hands.  On the contrary, one of my  favorite litigation experiences of all time (if there can be such a thing) was a case where not only did Chris get us out of the case under summary judgment, but got the court to award 100% of our legal fees.  It was a really complicated case, too. 

Congratulations Chris on a fine first outing.  I’d encourage folks to buy the novel and support this burgeoning artist.

The Bilski decision came down yesterday and I’m still in a state of complete denial.  Basically, the court punted on the difficult issues and while denying Bilski his patent, they didn’t do anything to help the horrible state of the patent ecosystem that we have today. 

(For a great summary of the case, check out the Groklaw summary). 

To make my stomach even more upset, today I was alerted to an article authored by Ted Sichelman entitled “Why Bilski Benefits Startup Companies.”

In short, Sichelman points to a study that he was involved with and tries to come to the conclusion that these types of patents are good for startups. 

To quote him:

“in a recent survey of startup firms, the Berkeley Patent Survey—which I conducted with Robert Merges and Pamela Samuelson of UC Berkeley School of Law and Stuart Graham (now Chief Economist at the PTO)—startup executives reported that nearly 70% of venture capital firms and 50% of angel investors said that patents were important to their investment decisions.”

While I vehemently disagree with the article, what I found most interesting was a commenter who used a prior post that I wrote on why the study that Shichelman was involved in may be flawed.

Sichelman attempts to refute my post in the comment section, but fails badly.

First of all, it seems clear to me that Sichelman has intuitions on patents based on his experiences and has used the data to fit his theories, rather than using the data in an unbiased way to figure out what is really going on with patents and startups.

I make this assertion based on a couple of observations:

1. Everytime he speaks about patents, he begins with the story of his one experience with a startup company and how patents may have helped.  I’ve had dinner with Ted and I’ve heard the story.  I’ve also seen the story pop up in every situation he discusses patents.  A sample size of one does not make a scientific set. 

2. Sichelman’s co-authors are no where to be found when he comes up with his conclusions.  Ted acknowledges that he doesn’t speak for his co-authors, but very easily uses the word “we” when discussing the study and “his” conclusions.  The blog post that I wrote refuting some parts of the conclusions of the study were not all my own ideas – they were the thoughts of his co-author Pam Samuelson who herself said the article really doesn’t say anything about VC attitudes toward patents.

It’s really clear that Sichelman has a bias that was probably preconceived on a data set of one (his startup) and not supported by his fellow authors who have not backed him up publically.

Furthermore if you read his comments on my blog post, his rebuttals don’t hold water as well.  (And you’ll want to read the comments for this part of this post to make any sense).

1. Response rates – just because you are the most comprehensive study doesn’t make the study necessarily any better.  It might, it might not.  I could be the world’s tallest midget and that still doesn’t get me much (no offense to midgets, sincerely).  I never definitively said the sample size was too low, rather it’s not rock solid clear that it was the right size or targeted the right companies.  It’s not an easy thing for them to do, granted, but we shouldn’t just accept the number “1300” being thrown out and assume that this is sufficient.  And per Sichelman’s own admission in his comments, only about 175 of the respondents were VC-backed startup companies.   This is not a large number.

2.  Only 75% answered the patent question and Sichelman says this is acceptable.  This is not.  In fact, others involved with the study have specifically questioned where the answer rate was a piece of data in itself.  Again, I’m not saying definitively this is data, rather the way Sichelman uses data like this as “proof” is not dispositive. 

3. Results biased toward non-venture backed companies.  Sichelman again presents a non-compelling argument.  First, 2/3rd of the sample size, according to his co-author Pam Samuelson were D&B companies, not VentureExpert companies.  Secondly, him trying to convince readers that I only have a sample size of 25 current portfolios is either poor research on his part about me, or ignoring the facts.  I’ve been involved in VC for over a decade and with well over 250 companies, which alone is larger than his sample size of 175 companies.

4. (My Favorite) – Just because we didn’t survey VCs doesn’t mean that we don’t know what VCs think.  To quote him:

“VCs were not surveyed directly – Although it would have been more reliable to survey VCs directly, unfortunately, our time and resources were limited. Nonetheless, there is little reason to believe that the reports of executives at startup firms regarding the views of VCs during the financing process—which is lengthy and involved—are inaccurate. Rather, executives are presumably well-aware of those items that VCs found important during due diligence.

Basically his response is:  “we couldn’t afford to interview VCs, so we just guessed by asking entrepreneurs.”  This is totally bogus and backed up by Pam Samuelson herself in recent remarks at the University of Colorado law school.  This only talks about perceptions that entrepreneurs have of VCs.  This says nothing about what VCs think.  To think that one study group can be substituted for another study group and presented as fact discredits the valid parts of the paper.  This is just bad science.  If it was good science, we’d just ask parents about what their kids really thought about things. 

In summary, it’s been a rough day thinking about what could have been with Bilski.  I’m getting a ton of backchannel about the politics behind the decision, which just makes me more upset.  To try to capitalize on the poor decision with articles like this just makes me more disappointed about the system and the supposed “experts” who pretend to know much more than they really do. 

Law.com has a great interview with Rich Baer, General Counsel and CAO at Qwest.  I find 99% of interviews worthless, but this is one of the few that allows the reader to actually understand the subject a bit.

The premise of the interview is that Rich is moving on from Qwest after the announced merger with CenturyTel closes early next year.  But more than that, Rich opines on the future of the in-house law practice and looks thoughtfully inward talking about what he will do differently next time. 

Rich has been recognized as a leading innovative thinker in all matters related to in-house counsel and was awarded the 2008 Legal Department of the Year. 

Best of all, despite his non-friendly picture in the interview (sorry Rich) and his hard driving passion for everything he does, Rich is sincerely a nice guy who hasn’t let any of his success go to his head.  Congrats Rich on a great run at Qwest and great interview. 

A little while ago, I blogged about how some public relations firms were spamming me.  In short, I was getting tired of random PR firms sending me emails about stuff that I didn’t care about and thus further cluttering up my inbox. 

These random carpet bombing strategies were both abusive and stupid – some poor client is paying their requisite $10-15k a month for the PR firm to make a bad impression on me.  In fact, I alerted a VC friend of mine that one of the firms was carpet bombing about his recent financings and he was none too happy.

One PR firm, in particular has really taken this to a new level:  Atomic PR.

The folks seriously suck ass.  Not only do they carpet bomb me, but every time I politely ask them to take me off the list of the stupid stuff they send me, they either one: don’t reply, or two: reply that they will, but never do.  And then I get an email from some new “bright and shining face” informing me of some “exciting news” that I couldn’t care less about. 

I tried to warn them, but apparently they didn’t believe me when I said that I would call them out. 

So, I officially start my boycott today, of AtomicPR until they vow to change their ways.  Don’t hire them.  And PLEASE link, share and retweet this post, so that when folks search for “AtomicPR,” the Google gods rank this post highly.

And Atomic guys – if you don’t stop, the next step is to report you to the appropriate government authorities since you don’t really allow anyone to opt out of their communications. 

If anyone has a lot of time on their hands and wants to email my friends at Atomic PR, here are their email addresses:

michelle.sabolich@atomicpr.com

allison@atomicpr.com

korina@atomicpr.com

aileen@atomicpr.com

Okay, some of you are sarcastic and are probably going to ask when I’m going to promote “Lunchtime with Dentists,” but give me a chance.

Next week, Boulder Startup Week will have an event that I’d encourage folks to check out:  Namely, Lunchtime with Lawyers. 

With over 3000 people expected to attend the Boulder Startup Week, this is a way of having startup attorneys in Boulder roll out the welcome mat for entrepreneurs.

The purpose is to provide entrepreneurs with an opportunity to meet with local startup attorneys in small groups and ask questions. The process is informal, but very informative. Not only do entrepreneurs get their questions answered; they also get to hear questions asked by other startups. The lawyers have an opportunity to meet with a target audience interested in their particular field of practice. The startup attorneys would have experience in patents, trademarks, finance, employment, corporate, etc. They will be from big firms as well as small firms.

The initial Lunchtime with Lawyers meeting will be held at the TechStars office at 1375 Walnut Street, Lower Level in Boulder.  We will provide food and request a $5 donation from those attending to cover costs.  To signup for the meeting, go to http://www.meetup.com/Lunchtime-with-Lawyers-CO-Entrepreneur-Attorney-Networking/.  If you have any questions or would like more information about the event, feel free to contact Roger Glovsky by phone (781) 676-1900 or by email at roger@ivlo.com.

My partner Brad recently wrote a blog post commenting on the proliferation of standardized seed financing documents.  The post was motivated by the highly-publicized release of the fourth instantiation of such a standard series of documents, this time by Ted Wang at Fenwick & West with collaboration from a group of bay-area early stage VC’s and angel investors.

If you are keeping score at home, there now exist the following sets of standards that have been made public:

• TechStars Model Seed Funding Documents (by Cooley);
• Y Combinator Series AA Equity Financing Documents (by WSGR);
• Founders Institute Plain Preferred Term Sheet (by WSGR); and
• Series Seed Financing Documents (by Fenwick & West).

(**Disclosure: I had participation with the TechStars set**)

Brad noted that it seemed silly to have four different versions and decided to invite everyone together in a room to come up with one, universally accepted set of model documents.  The immediate response was tremendous.  33 comments to the post and countless more emails from lawyers, entrepreneurs, VCs all praising the effort and wanting to know how they could get involved.

And all I could think was “Feld, you haven’t a clue what you’ve gotten yourself into.  This is going to end badly.” (and then the second thought was “Damnit, I bet all of these emails end up in my inbox too,” which they did, but then gave me fodder for this blog).

Why? Because there will never be a standardized set.  Not because there shouldn’t be, but rather once you introduce humans to execute the task, it simply doesn’t work.

And those humans are called lawyers and venture capitalists (and not entrepreneurs).  Despite all the handwringing about “doing it for the entrepreneur” I don’t think these two sets of humans will ever get their act together well enough to do what they say they want to do.  Here is why.

Lawyers:

Lawyers are like congress people.  If they aren’t involved in something, it’s nearly impossible to get their vote.  If they are involved then they are obliged to be “value additive” to the process.  In other words, the more lawyers, the more support and the more bloated of a document set, because everyone needs to get in a point to save face.

If you don’t believe me, see the NVCA model documents (I’ve been in the room while they have been drafted).  While the documents are great in that every potential scenarios has been imagined (and even more importantly to show you what should never be included in financing documents by their omission), the documents are too complicated for 90% of the folks out there doing the deals.  And then you add in the east-coast / west-coast differences (I think many east-coast terms can be entrepreneur unfriendly) and now you have a treatise as opposed to streamlined set of documents.  (As an aside, I don’t want this to turn into a east coast / west coast debate.  If you want to see what I think about terms, read this series).

Many of Brad’s email responses included this not-so-veiled threat: “you need me as part of your syndicate, or I won’t sign off on the documents and you’ll not have broad support.  My firm is important [insert canned marketing paragraph here].”  At the end of the day, Brad would have had 50+ lawyers in the room and we’d be right back to where we started with the NVCA project.

Even more importantly, however, lawyers are driven by more important things (to them) than helping entrepreneurs save legal costs.  Lawyers are driven by fees and thus they want to acquire more clients.  Releasing a set of documents that get you on the cover of peHub and Techcrunch is good for business.  You may streamline some hours, but you are betting on more clients.

Therefore, you have no incentive to join other groups, as it’s your name that is getting all the good publicity.  Why be a part of “working group X” when you can be “Joe Smith, super lawyer to the entrepreneur?”  While I can’t disclose the particular emails, rest assured that this paragraph is much more than an assertion, but a fact.

Lastly, there is also pride of authorship, by lawyers, even in situations where the documents should be boilerplate – as the case is here.  Every firm has their set of documents that they consider “better” than others.  Are they?  Or are they lazy and haven’t even read the other firms’ (or maybe they don’t have access).  I haven’t read them all.  I don’t want to either, but I can tell you that I’ve only seen a few firms out there that actually have better forms.

Bottom line:  Too many cooks spoil the soup, while the celebrity chefs don’t even want to cook with you.

Venture Capitalists:

Let’s not let the lawyers take all the blame, though.  While I do think the incentives of the VCs are good here, we have our own issues.

First, we, as the business drivers of the provisions, can’t necessarily agree on the basic terms.  That is problem one.  I don’t have a way to fix this one.

Secondly, most VCs aren’t lawyers and their level of deal comprehension varies greatly.  (Note: there are plenty of non-lawyer VCs that can take me to the woodshed, so this isn’t a statement that all lawyer-VCs are better).  So what do we, as an industry do?  We hire lawyers to produce a standard set of forms that we might not completely understand ourselves.

The end-result is our trusty lawyer tells us “our forms are better” and we take it for granted never minding the misalignment of incentives (lawyers want to make money, we want to save money for the entrepreneurs).  In fact, if you ask some of the business people around the table of these four sets, they really can’t tell you how any of these documents differ from the others.  They will always refer you to their lawyer.

Want more proof?  The latest set of documents from Fenwick and supported by a number of investors has a provision allowing for $10k of investor counsel fees.  If the investors really understood everything in the documents and were prepared to take them “as is” I would expect that number to be zero.  In fact, the three other sets of standardized documents have $0 fees for investor counsel.

Bottom line: until the VCs truly understand everything in these documents, they are going to continue to rely on the forms of their favorite lawyers and not those generated by others.

So which of the four forms are better to use?  I don’t know.  I’ve only read half of them.  And I don’t really have the burning desire to read more of them, as I predict even more proliferation.  That being said, here are a couple of interesting factoids.

1.  Yokum Taku has a nice post and matrix comparing the documents; and

2.  I heard from one name-brand law firm that working with one of these standardized sets (which I won’t name either for professional courtesy reasons) is a horrific experience in spell checking, capitalized term mismanagement and sloppy draftsmanship.  So just because they are released and publicized doesn’t mean they are necessarily any good.

So my prediction?  My dear partner Brad, while heart in the right place, will fail to come up with one set of widely used seed documents.  Sad, but true.

Of course the horrible irony is that none of this is intellectually difficult.  Maybe I’ll just come up with my own set of documents and…. oh wait……

The guys over at Legal River emailed today and let me know about a new product offering that they’ve come up with called Attorney River.

Attorney River is trying to help improve upon the lawyer directory model, i.e. Martindale, which has not seen a lot of innovation in the last few decades. Attorney River allows lawyers to post a request for other lawyers – whether it be for outsourcing work or to find a specialist for a client in a different state. Interested lawyers can then respond to the posting. The system takes the onus off the lawyer who is currently wading through directories cold calling other lawyers.

They tell me that creating an account is free and posting of issues is also free. 

I find numbers fascinating and even better when they are put into context with digestible displays.  Data visualization is key and people with these skills will be in demand for my lifetime and well beyond.

Two recent experiences with large data sets has been satisfying to me.  Unfortunately, both are showing the continual deterioration of the U.S. economy, but from a consumption standpoint, they are very interesting.

1.  Heatmap over time of U.S. Unemployment.  This is outstanding work, if not completely depressing;

2. If you are interested in the major law firm layoffs, which measure an incredible 14,457 people since January 2008 (5,677 lawyers, 8,780 staff), then Law Shucks is the place to go.  Their layoff trackers are great for digesting exactly what is going on and I’ve been told that even better displays are on their way.

Enjoy.  Or at least respect the work behind the bad news.